Thomson Reuters Predicts Nobelists

According to citation statistics, researchers behind programmed cell death pathways and CRISPR/Cas9 are among those in line for Nobel Prizes this year.

Sep 21, 2016

Bob Grant

WIKIMEDIA, ZERO GREYWith October rapidly approaching, the scientific community is anticipating the announcement of who will win this year’s Nobel Prizes. In the meantime, the predictions are flying. As usual, information company Thomson Reuters has offered its statistical prognostication approach, using recent citation activity to tap who might be receiving a life-changing phone call from Stockholm. The firm released its list of 2016 “Citation Laureates” this morning (September 21). Here are the life science highlights:

2016 Citation Laureates in Physiology or Medicine

James Allison of MD Anderson Cancer Center, University of Texas; Jeffrey Bluestone of the University of California, San Francisco Medical School; and Craig Thompson, CEO of the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center for “explaining how CD28 and CTLA-4 are regulators of T cell activation, modulating immune response.”

Gordon Freeman of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School; Tasuku Honjo of Kyoto University; and Arlene Sharpe of Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital for “elucidating programmed cell death-1 (PD-1) and its pathway, which has advanced cancer immunotherapy.”

University of Basel’s Michael Hall; David Sabatini of MIT and the Whitehead Institute; and Stuart Schreiber of Harvard University for “discoveries of the growth regulator Target of Rapamycin (TOR) and the mechanistic Target of Rapamycin (mTOR).”

And this year’s Citation Laureates in Chemistry

George Church of Harvard Medical School and Feng Zhang of MIT and the Broad Institute for the “application of CRISPR-cas9 gene editing in mouse and human cells.”

Dennis Lo Yuk Ming of the Chinese University of Hong Kong for “detecting cell-free fetal DNA in maternal plasma, a revolution in noninvasive prenatal testing.”

Hiroshi Maeda of Sojo University and the Kumamoto University School of Medicine and Yasuhiro Matsumura of Japan’s National Cancer Center for “discovering the enhanced permeability and retention (EPR) effect of macromolecular drugs, a key finding for cancer therapeutics.”